Crossing Over

"Do you think that our characters from our stories could ever meet?" Mo asks as she grabs the cup of coffee that Virgil made for her from the counter and the homemade hotteuk, a sweet cinnamon sugar filled Korean pancake.

"What do you mean?" Virgil asks as he is ready to begin another day of typing his story about Bruno, a missing musician.

"Like, do you ever think about the relation of characters to other characters in different story lines?"

"Like a crossover episode? Well, it depends… I think in fiction, you intentionally create characters that have relations to each other at a specific time and place; thus, creating elements of a story," Virgil says as his eyes are still fixed to his computer, waiting for the power to turn on. "But, if those stories somehow align, then perhaps it can happen with both the support of the writers and readers… I never asked you, who is the character in your story?"

"I don't really have a character in my story," Mo says, "I'm writing about the personifications of loneliness."

Virgil turns his head toward Mo, "Hey… I know we promised not to psychoanalyze our writing, but are you doing okay?" Virgil's question is not unprompted or presumptuous — Mo's father suffered through depression and committed suicide when she was 18. Although Mo never saw or contacted her father when her mother split with him when she was 13, she still wonders and holds a sharp sense of pain and guilt for not trying harder to reach out before he left the world.

"Yes, I'm fine," Mo says as she looks Virgil in the eyes. She almost forgot how delicate his brown eyes and long eyelashes were. "I wanted to write this story to make sense of what, how, and why someone could feel so lonely to the point of losing themselves and to the people they're surrounded by."

Virgil's eyes remain on Mo's. He gets up from his stationed laptop and chair and hugs Mo. Her head remains on his chest, her fingers still curling the cup of warm coffee while loosely wrapping her arms around Virgil's back.

"The hotteuk you made this morning was delicious," Mo says. Like the warm, gooey sweetness that filled the Korean pancake, Virgil provided that same sense of warmth that filled Mo from the inside. Virgil plants a kiss on Mo's forehead. Mo takes the final sip of coffee before putting the coffee in the sink. Before Mo heads out to work at her 9–5 corporate job, she sits on the chair near the door as she slips on her white sneakers and stares at Virgil from behind typing away.

--

Being stuck in the in between may simply mean that you're living —

nights filled with cheap bottles of wine

mornings filled with warm cups of coffee and hotteuk

forehead kisses and hugs from V

and being lonely may be the absence of having cross over episodes with other people.